I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

I know people said I wasn’t selling out in America, but that was entirely untrue. We sold out all over the world, and every night I looked out into the fans and those front rows that you’re talking about, the tears, the honesty, the inability to not be completely overjoyed because they felt accepted.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I am confident that when the facts and policies have been examined, when the record of performances have been reviewed, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will once again be elected to lead our beloved country to a better future.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It’s very simple.

Bad performances can happen and are not that serious – even with new players. You can’t, say, sell him, get a new one.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

If you watch any good player, they’re using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They’re moving in many dimensions at once.

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook’s a free service. It’s free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

I never wanted to perform and never proclaimed myself to be a performer.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL.

My goal is to entertain myself and others.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Never at any point did I feel like missing a training session. I was very keen on improving as a cricketer and as an international player.

When I’m really interested in something, I get superfocused on that. And I can spend hours upon hours not getting tired of reading about it and still be interested to learn more about it.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

Stand-up is my baby.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

You can be passionate about anything.

I like Cardi B!

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.

You always want to quit while you are ahead. You don’t want to be like a fighter who stays too long in the ring until you’re not performing at your best.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.